Danger: America Is Losing Its Edge In Innovation

I’ve visited more than 100 countries in the past several years, meeting people from all walks of life, from impoverished children in India to heads of state. Almost every adult I’ve talked with in these countries shares a belief that the path to success is paved with science and engineering.

In fact, scientists and engineers are celebrities in most countries. They’re not seen as geeks or misfits, as they too often are in the U.S., but rather as society’s leaders and innovators. In China, eight of the top nine political posts are held by engineers. In the U.S., almost no engineers or scientists are engaged in high-level politics, and there is a virtual absence of engineers in our public policy debates.

Why does this matter? Because if American students have a negative impression – or no impression at all – of science and engineering, then they’re hardly likely to choose them as professions. Already, 70% of engineers with PhD’s who graduate from U.S. universities are foreign-born. Increasingly, these talented individuals are not staying in the U.S – instead, they’re returning home, where they find greater opportunities.

Part of the problem is the lack of priority U.S. parents place on core education. But there are also problems inherent in our public education system. We simply don’t have enough qualified math and science teachers. Many of those teaching math and science have never taken a university-level course in those subjects.

I’ve always wanted to be a teacher; in fact, I took early retirement from my job in the aerospace industry to pursue a career in education. But I was deemed unqualified to teach 8th-grade math in any school in my state. Ironically, I was welcomed to the faculty at Princeton University, where the student newspaper ranked my course as one of 10 that every undergraduate should take.

In a global, knowledge-driven economy there is a direct correlation between engineering education and innovation. Our success or failure as a nation will be measured by how well we do with the innovation agenda, and by how well we can advance medical research, create game-changing devices and improve the world.

I continue to be active in organizations like the IEEE to help raise the profile of the engineering community and ensure that our voice is heard in key public policy decisions. That’s also why I am passionate about the way engineering should be taught as a profession – not as a collection of technical knowledge, but as a diverse educational experience that produces broad thinkers who appreciate the critical links between technology and society.

Here we are in a flattening world, where innovation is the key to success, and we are failing to give our young people the tools they need to compete. Many countries are doing a much better job. Ireland, despite a devastated economy, just announced it will increase spending on basic research. Russia is building an “innovation city” outside of Moscow. Saudi Arabia has a new university for science and engineering with a staggering $10 billion endowment. (It took MIT 142 years to reach that level.) China is creating new technology universities literally by the dozens.

These nations and many others have rightly concluded that the way to win in the world economy is by doing a better job of educating and innovating. And America? We’re losing our edge. Innovation is something we’ve always been good at. Until now, we’ve been the undisputed leaders when it comes to finding new ideas through basic research, translating those ideas into products through world-class engineering, and getting to market first through aggressive entrepreneurship.

That’s how we rose to prominence. And that’s where we’re falling behind now. The statistics tell the story.

U.S. consumers spend significantly more on potato chips than the U.S. government devotes to energy R&D.

In 2009, for the first time, over half of U.S. patents were awarded to non-U.S. companies.

China has replaced the U.S. as the world’s number one high-technology exporter.

Between 1996 and 1999, 157 new drugs were approved in the U.S. Ten years later, that number had dropped to 74.

The World Economic Forum ranks the U.S. #48 in quality of math and science education.

Innovation is the key to survival in an increasingly global economy. Today we’re living off the investments we made over the past 25 years. We’ve been eating our seed corn. And we’re seeing an accelerating erosion of our ability to compete. Charles Darwin observed that it is not the strongest of the species that survives, nor the most intelligent, but rather the one most adaptable to change.

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I agree. I’m a physist. The ONLY way to make money in this country is through GREED! Believe me, I tried many ways and accepted the prosaic practice here. I’m also very knowledgeable in intellectual property, legal and otherwise, and using this as our salvation will lead to ruin. Ask any honest, not many, patent lawyer. Our patent system is nearly hopelessly entanged.

Wait a minute – 13 years ago, when America was the undisputed leader in innovation, we were told that the gigantic flood of foreign guest workers would help us complete and help keep our economy going. You mean to tell me it was all a lie. It seems big business’ thirst for cheap foreign labor has created competitors and now clowns like this ary crying about it? Corporate America is to blame. If we had rewarded and protected our own workforce to begin with, we wouldn’t be in this mess.

Globalism and outsourcing are management fads, whose multiple failures cast doubt on their wisdom every day.

We have given away our best jobs and industries to people and and nations who don’t like us very much and who are salivating at the thought of helping in our takedown. Smart? Does America have enough jobs to give away to satisfy India, China, and the rest of the world? Do the math.

The only thing that will save America is to get Americans back to work. We need to back away from globalism and start moving towards self-sufficiency. Rare earths should have been a wake-up call. Oil too. What, will we finally notice when the wake-up call is food, or when our children are kept out of schools and industries in our own land (That’s starting to happen, btw)?

Just calling people names doesn’t invalidate their observations or their arguments. America needs to change direction, and fast.

I’m not surprised America is lacking on innovation. In other countries, specially Asian countries, people who are good in science, and numbers in general, are praised and set as example. In America somebody who is good with science and numbers is considered a geek (and sometimes made fun of), but at the same time anyone who is good at sports is praised and admired. How a young kid can feel encouraged to pursue an interest in science if he/she knows he’ll be cast as a geek or lame for doing so? Parents usually brag of their sons when they’re in the football team in High School, but they don’t brag so much if they’re the valedictoriam or if they win the science fair.I think way too much praise and admiration go to sports and players and none to scientist and researchers, who really work on making our lives better one innovation at the time. As important as funding better education programs, the American mentality of what really “cool” and/or “lame” is should change. The real change should come from us.

I am a science professor at a state university. I was really sorry that either there was no opportunity to comment or I missed the deadline to comment on Rising Above the Gathering Storm. About 6 years ago, I was teaching and realized that seniors in college had not incorporated any of their majors training into their imagination. I spent time wondering what was the problem. I gave a talk to the NABT and talked to teachers around the country and they all agreed that their students were asking for more models, could not imagine what they had just been told, e.g. how a ribosome works, and could not think about the next question in an experiment. There was a study about Russian children who were not allowed to pretend play – and it affected analytical and symbolic reasoning and some other characteristics. I realized, my own sons being college age, that we had not let them just roam around, had put them in organized sports and that, along with teaching to the test had inadvertently created a resonance of passive education. There are ways to intervene and turn students around, but the popular critical thinking approaches only serve to reinforce the ADDness that is caused when boys especially are required to be and rewarded for being passive. It is a shame that when we need the most innovative generation, we have inadvertently rewarded our students for being the least innovative – memorizers. That said, there are some students who have avoided this trap. I have seen one home-schooled student, one student from a rural community, and a hearing-impaired student who were ready to be innovative.

I am an electronic engineering consultant. I spend some time on engineering message boards, discussing wireless design problems. Almost all of my conversations are with engineers outside of the USA. India, China, Europe, Pakistan, etc etc. There are apparently PLENTY of design projects going on all over the world, and young engineers right out of school doing the design work. Why are there no young USA engineers posting?

The problem stated in the article is false. We do not have trouble getting students to study engineering! We have BIG trouble giving them a good and stable engineering job for when they do graduate college. What we offer them is some zero-pay internship to get “experience”. You want to recover Americas engineering edge? Provide research monies (SBIR grants, etc), but key them to startup companies with only 10 of fewer employees. You will have a new wave of young tecnologists solving all sorts of problems. Give them a job, and they will come.

I’m tired of hearing doom talk that is intended to increase government spending and thus interference with individuals, even more when sprinkled with vague terms like “eating our seed corn” and a hackneyed reference to Darwin.

As well, Norman Augustine fails to include the effect of increasing government caution on new drug approvals, and does not provide statistics on patents awarded to US companies in other countries. (Patents aren’t what they seem to be at first look – they can be obscure ones whose purpose is simply resume building (especially good for foreigners trying to qualify for immigration), or manipulative ones (to block competitors, for example).

I do question the public educational system, which is typically a bureaucracy teaching bad ideas and often union-driven. That may be the reason a school system considered Augustine unfit to teach – sheepskins are a way to justify higher salaries and counter criticism of school system performance, so there is a push for requiring higher degrees.

As well there is an anti-technology bias in media and politics in the US, which politicians pander to. Augustine seems to take a shortage-mentality view of various fiefdoms, whereas trading values creates – when protected by justice and defense. (Isn’t that the function Augustine worked in? Early elimination of threats like Hitler, the Imperial Shinto regime, and al Qaeda is essential to fostering productive societies to trade values with.)

I urge voters to get government out of the way of people. (Large companies have been propped up by government, General Motors being a prime example, instead of letting the assets and people go to better management.)

Andrew Bernsteins book “Capitalism Unbound” covers the need more broadly than its title may suggest, including by chronicling what succeeded for humans throughout history, and especially of the way of life enabled by the principles of the society Augustine is concerned about – the United States.

I completely agree with this. We are forming a aristocracy and abandoning our previous meritocracy. Executives get bonuses, whether do well or not. (Yes, they do!) Engineers suffer pay and job loss. This helps pay the executives. We no longer invest in America. I’m forced to conclude we no longer believe in America. We being the executive elite which only wants its own bonuses. This has been going on for decades and is really obvious now. Long live India and China! The new world powers, at our executives hands! It would be wonderful if this reverses, but I don’t see how at this time. (By the way, executives should suffer at LEAST proportionately with engineers. They do NO more.)